Musings from southern New Mexico

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Monthly Archives: November 2013

A couple of decades ago, a person who gained employment working with top secret documents with the intent of stealing and distributing those documents to America’s adversaries would have been called a spy.

Of course your modern Libertarian doesn’t see it that way. Since the government is now run by one of those people, if you know what I mean, espionage isn’t really that big a deal.

Google doesn’t help me narrow down the originator (that is, there are too many possible original sources), but I have read in many places something like, “Scratch the surface of a Libertarian, and you find an authoritarian.”

Here, libertarians bestow the title of “whistleblower” on a person whose actions certainly meet the definition of premeditated espionage. To many libertarians any damage done to the United States of America is worth it, so long there is harm done to the administration of that … person. Thus does a person that would otherwise be considered just another privileged asshole get to live out a fantasy in which foreign governments allow him to pretend to be some sort of hero while under complete control so long as he continues to provide damaging information.

I haven’t really read much on Lara Logan’s bogus Benghazi story. I took one important thing away from the post-report reporting on 60 Minutes. Apparently, Lara Logan is extremely dedicated. Despite the fact that she was obviously suffering breathing issues throughout the recording period, she soldiered on in her dramatically half-assed “mistakes were made” statement. In it, she related how her team had spent a year “researching” the bullshit story. She failed, however, to explain how during that year of “research” her crack team of “journalists” had failed to due undergraduate level fact checking.

Should the fact that mercenaries are generally no more trustworthy than the criminals that typically employ them be considered adequate cause to do some digging? Probably. But that is just my opinion, I suppose. I’m no journalist.

Having traded in my dirham for dollars, I have returned to my familiar haunt, the Chihuahuan Desert of southern New Mexico. It’s probably a good thing, too, as my exercise regime suffered greatly. I did spend an hour or so swimming the Persian Gulf just a few hours prior to flying out of Abu Dhabi. The name is apparently a point of contention ‘twixt the Arabs and the Persians. In the media on the south side of the gulf, it is called the Arabian Gulf.